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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off; the left is currently the majority, and the right is, on average, old.

In this regard, it's absolutely a "viable approach": By making it low-status to be right-wing, or even by not carrying right-wing views on popular private platforms, it makes the right-wing destined to lose out somewhere along the line simply due to the youth not wanting to associate with them.

It's a waiting game above anything, and on a long enough scale it looks like the winner is clear here, for better or worse.

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The weird problem with this strategy is that there's a number of people who become more conservative, for whatever reason, as they get older.

The generation that comprised the hippies are now in their 80s. Mitch McConnell would have been in that generation.

So while the current crop of conservatives are dying off, they are being replaced by new members.

It's not enough to make up the gap, though. Further, hippies rarely voted, and weren't the majority or even close to the majority of their generation.

It's typically because they get wealthier as they get older. I'm not expecting millennials and gen-X to get more conservative. Zoomers, maybe.

> "The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off..."

Seems doubtful. Rural and poor areas remain strongholds for conservatism and that seems unlikely to change. The urban left may increasingly outnumber rural conservatives but that doesn't necessarily give them more power thanks to the way that the electoral system and government in the United States is structured.

What does "winning" even mean for the left? The people who choose leftism will win against everyone else for the reasons you say, but like all political victories, winning is (comparatively) the easy part. Keeping your values intact and governing a successful society is the hard part.

The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism. What remains?

What's good about liberalism?

They seem more progressive than ever; an open socialist nearly won their primary last year.

Liberalism and progressiveism are not the same thing.

> The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism.

This is a direct quote from the post I am replying to. I know liberalism and progressiveness aren't the same thing. I am stating that they're getting more progressive, and I don't see why liberalism declining is a bad thing.

Socialism, liberalism, and progressivism are all different ideas.

Leftism tries to combine these ideas into a coherent political ideology. Liberalism (the part about individual rights) is a check on the abuses of socialism, and progressivism is supposed to make it all work (experts in control making good decisions).

I'm not a Leftist, but I can acknowledge that it's a coherent ideology.

When you take Leftism and take away liberalism and progressivism, you are left with rebels that have no solution to anything. Like BLM and antifa which are always recruiting to attack a mysterious "system" rather than making serious proposals. (It's always easier to get people to agree on a problem than a solution.) If they were to win, it would look more like Venezuela or Cuba than Denmark or Sweden.

I know that liberalism and progressiveness are different things. Liberalism isn't tied to progressiveness, but progressiveness is inherently tied to economic justice. Socialism is certainly a progressive stance.

Liberalism can be dropped with no real loss.

What's wrong with Cuba? It seems like it's doing pretty well; it has more or less the longest-lasting government in South America, largely because it dropped liberalism.

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